An amazing amount of edible food in our modern world is thrown away for no good reason. Estimates are that in the West between 30 and 50 per cent of most families’ food shopping is discarded. In some cases this is understandable. Some of the fruit and vegetables that I always buy too much of in my bid to be healthy goes soft and mouldy, attracts insects and ends up in the bin. But this is the exception.
Many people now treat products past their best-before dates as deadly, or at least likely to cause food poisoning. The common myth is that microbes eventually take over the product and that ingesting the resulting mix of the two is likely to be toxic. Few people realise that these dates are just estimates of food quality, not of safety.
There are clearly real things to steer clear of, particularly when it comes to raw meat like mass-produced chicken, where salmonella or campylobacter can take over and potentially cause stomach infections; but if the item has been refrigerated this is not linked to length of storage. Most infections occur well before you buy the product. When supermarket foods age they may lose taste and structure and their microbe composition may change, but they are not harmful.
Good cheese, as we discussed, is already overrun with bacteria and fungi, but scraping off the mouldy crust is perfectly fine. The same goes for jams, yoghurt and pickles. Even preservatives like vinegar or olive oils which don’t go off currently have best-before and use-by dates. I haven’t done a scientific survey, but I have yet to meet anyone who got ill from anything in their own fridge. Strangely, most infections come from eating out, where you might have thought standards of hygiene were stricter. Luckily, food infections, which are usually due to meats and eggs, are steadily decreasing in most countries and are a quarter of the levels of twenty-five years ago.1
The sell-by dates on food labels were originally used to help supermarkets restock the shelves from the warehouse and improve efficiency, but they soon found that consumers liked reading them so that they could select the freshest products and reject those past the date. This led food companies, encouraged by governments, to add yet more confusing dates – best-before, sell-by, use-by etc. – as they quickly realised that this way more food got discarded, which increased sales. The whole business has now got out of hand, and many people are enraged at the billions of kilos of food thrown away by supermarkets as well as by consumers, who wrongly half-empty their fridges or cupboards every week purely on account of these labels.
In a recent survey of supermarket bosses, nearly all said that they regularly ate out-of-date products and regarded them as perfectly safe. While still keeping ‘use-by’ dates the EU has finally decided to phase out useless ‘best-before’ labels on totally safe products like rice and pasta in a bid to reduce confusion and waste. In the US the situation is worse, because each state still has different and confusing label regulations. The manufacturers are happy with the confusion, as the shorter the use-by dates the more people will throw away and restock.
Incidentally, we also throw away many expensive drugs unnecessarily; most prescribed medications are fine way beyond their use-by dates. Often the texture may change, but the active ingredients are still present. One study stringently tested 150 drugs and found 80 per cent were potent many years past their expiry date.2 There are a few rare exceptions such as the antibiotic tetracycline, which loses its efficacy quickly, and liquids that can separate out. Most doctors’ cupboards, like mine, are full of ‘expired’ medicines that they never throw away, and although they may lose up to 10 per cent of their potency there are no reports that I’ve been able to find of anyone suffering the effects of an expired drug. Charities like Médecins sans Frontières are collecting the returned medicines from pharmacies in a few Western countries, to use in the Third World, and the US have a program that will cautiously extend shelf lives.3
We should, and can, do a lot better than this. As far as food storage is concerned, our society needs to re-evaluate our ground rules and reassess the balance of risk. The minuscule health risks of consuming food or medicines that have lost their colour or texture need to be balanced against the implications of accepting zero risks: for a start, by throwing it in the bin we are certainly contributing to climate change.
Until we change our exaggerated fear of microbes we will find it hard to make the right moral and health decisions.